A tale of two newspaper vendors

I went walking again this morning. It is part of an effort of mine to live more healthy, loose weight and attack the efforts of ageing.

The view along the way is very beautiful. Some gardens are quite exquisite. I am fortunate to live in a very well-to-do neighborhood.

A side-effect is meeting other people on the street. This morning I met Johnny Blankenberg. He sells newspapers at the intersection that forms the one entrance to our neighborhood. Actually, I met him before, but today is the first time I actually spoke to him. He is always friendly, always praising the Lord and praying that Jesus will bless you.

Today, he told me something about his life. He was on the street for 37 years. Two years ago he gave is life to Christ. He married Rina. They have a baby girl now. Rina, however, has backslidden and is back in the world. I must please pray that she turn to God again. He also has a bungalow and is now looking for a stand among other Christians. And Jesus is his anchor, praise God.

At the other entrance to our neighboor I spoke to Edward. I know him well, as he used to sell the newspapers at that intersection. Now, he only works there on Saturdays. I asked him where he is stationed as news paper vendor during the week. He replied that he doesn't work during the week any more. His mother is ill and he is looking after her. She has cancer. Edward gestured to his upper body when he said that, leaving me to assume it is lung cancer or something similar. He looks like a shy person, withdrawn and all.

Edward looks as if he isn't a day older than 18. He is also a coloured guy. My heart goes out to him. How do they cope financially? Was he the sole provider of his family? Could it be that his mother is dying of AIDS, even (a possibility, living in South Africa).

I have no idea how to share the love of Christ with him. So I said I'll pray for him and his mother.

MIDWEEK DEVOTION: Being sick and tired of being sick and tired (1)

Written by Andries Combrink of Centurion West Presbyterian Church.

One of our challenges is that our strength is exhaustible. We all run out of energy sometimes and have to face the problem of being weary.

We simply have to deal with weariness. We cannot accept being sick and tired as a way of life. We all have to learn about how to tap into the strength of God to overcome the risks of exhaustion, because the risks are many and it holds danger for our physical health, emotional wellness and our spiritual vitality.

Isaiah 40:30-31 deals with the fact that we all become tired, even the youth and even vigorous young men! It says:
"Though youths grow weary and tired, and vigorous young men stumble badly, yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength: They will mount up with wings like eagles, they will run and not get tired, they will walk and not become weary."

Isaiah, deals here with two truths we should be aware of to be able to defend our ourselves against weariness and to manage our risks. The first is the obvious truth, that every one grows weary. As we already said, even the fittest and healthiest young person does. The second truth is a deeper and most important truth and faith reality, that, as we learn to trust and expectantly wait on the Lord, we tap into his inexhaustible strength. Are we willing to remain sick and tired of being sick and tired, or, are we willing to learn about how to, through faith and trust in God, manage our energy, challenges and risks through a living relationship with the Lord?

We need to take note of the risks of allowing ourselves to become exhausted. And it is a choice to take on too much, to stress too much, not to be able to say no, in time, to have life priorities where being rested and having time to rest on God are too low on our list. Then we run the risk of being so vulnerable that we, in the words of Isaiah “stumble badly”. When our priories are primarily materialistic or when be defy reality thinking we can move mountains without faith – even spiritual mountains – we eventually will stumble badly!

When we allow ourselves to become too tired we also become vulnerable and defenseless against the enemy, namely the evil attacks and temptations. We also loose perspective and we become victims of despair, of despondency and depression. We may burn all our energy to try to win the whole world and then we may loose our souls, as Jesus said.

During the following few Wednesdays we are going to discuss about being sick and tired of being sick and tired here in the Midweek Devotion. And how God’s purpose, wisdom, strength and life can take us out of the rut that we may mount up with wings like eagles, running without getting tired and walking without becoming weary!

Here is a hint of where to start - if we in faith rest upon the Lord, trust his judgment, live according to his values, say no to the principles of darkness that run our plans, dreams and diaries, and return to the restful peace who is our God, and fellowship with the source of light, who is our God, and obey the Kingdom principles of the all wise and all knowing, who is our God, we will fly, run and walk with joy and hope and enthusiasm, again!

Say no to exhausting schedules today. Say yes to being recuperated by sharing quiet time and worship time with the source of rest, love, trust and hope, Jesus Christ, who died, that we may live triumphantly.
(I know this may sound airy-fairy – but watch this space for God’s reality!)

WE CAN SELL ANYTHING, EVEN PRAYERS

Julian Smith is well known for the parodies he produces. This one shows quite satirically how the Christian world of this day and age succeeded in turning a relationship with God into a profitable commodity.

PS I owe Bosco Peters (on Twitter: @Liturgy) a debt of gratitude for first finding Julian's vidclip!

Julian calls this: "Pre-Blessed Food" (Click HERE to see it directly on Youtube).

MIDWEEK DEVOTION

Written by Andries Combrink, pastor of Centurion West Presbyterian Church.

The Ultimate Love Affair (5) – with all your strength

Not only do you have to love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, you are required to love him with all your strength. Christianity is more than heartfelt dedication or soulful passion for Jesus. It is even more than thoroughly considering the Scriptures and saying “Yes” to what God revealed about himself. Being a Christian needs to be lived in every aspect of our lives. To love God with all our strength means to love God in everything that we do.

In Colossians 3:17 it says, "And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Christianity that is only in the heart or only in the mind may be the reason we fall for either sentimentalism or intellectualism. But being a true Christian is to practically live for the Lord. This changes our faith into a strong and powerful service to God’s Kingdom. It makes us soldiers of the cross.

A Christian lifestyle is required if we truly love the Lord. James says in his letter that faith without good deeds is a dead faith. We must be "doers of the word" he says. We can also say that faith that does not inspire Christian living is faith without love and Paul says that even if we have the faith to move mountains, if we do not have love, we are NOTHING.

We must be careful not to consent intellectually to the Christian faith while our lives, our practices, our priorities and the values according to which we live shout louder than what we say we believe. And what it may shout is that Christ is not relevant to everything in our lives. The powerlessness of many a church lies in the problem that too many whose names are on their rolls may not be far from the Kingdom of God, yet they are not in the Kingdom, of the Kingdom and for the Kingdom of God.

Hanging out with the Church does not make you a follower of Jesus. It is committing everything you are and you do to Christ and to surrender to his will in the most practical way imaginable that testifies of being truthful in your confession of being a Christian. What a tragedy it is to be so close to the Kingdom of God that you agree to what the Bible teaches, and you even sometimes wipe away a tear because you are touched emotionally by the Gospel, yet you live outside the City of God and the family of God, because you do not love the Lord with all your strength and all your choices and you are not doing what will make a difference to the glory of his Name and the extension of his Kingdom.

Jesus said – Seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness, and everything else you need will also be given to you.

What is the top priority in your life? We must surrender all that we are to all that God is, and dedicate ourselves to live for Christ. Submit to the guidance of his Spirit in a way that reflects a love for God that is genuinely devoted, full of passion, thoroughly considered, and finally, also fully lived for the Lord.

That is the ultimate love affair – an all consuming life for God.

STOP ALL ILLEGAL POACHING

Well, ee, poaching is illegal. Period. Thanks to Zapiro.

THIS IS HOW I FEEL TODAY

I feel like this today.

Thank you, Nakedpastor.

Midweek Devotion: The Ultimate Love Affair (4) - with all your mind!

Written by: Andries Combrink, pastor of Centurion West Presbyterian Church.

Our love for Christ begins with a pure devotion with all our heart, and expresses itself by being full of passion, with all our soul.

But there is more to the ultimate love affair. Jesus says that you are to love the Lord your God with all your mind. Our love for God is to be one that is systematically thought out too.

Loving Jesus is more than excitement and more than euphoric warmth and experience. It is not emotion that is illogical, and that excludes good understanding and dedicated learning.

There is a brand of Christian teaching that creates the impression that clear thinking, study and considering the Bible can get in the way of our relationship with God. While it is true that when you rely on intellectual aptitude to figure out God, you will always fail. God cannot be fathomed by human minds. And if you wait until you have figured God out, all the reasoning and debate can stand in the way of a blessed and spontaneous love affair with the Lord. Yes, our minds can be a barrier preventing us from devoted, passionate love.

But that does not mean that our minds are also a big help in growing our relationship with God.

It is clear from the Scriptures that God knows that our minds, our thinking, our insight and our contemplation are always involved in our love for him. In Romans 12, we are told that our minds need to be renewed and then we will live for God with pure commitment. And Jesus says we are to love God with all our mind.

A mind committed to Christ, transformed by the renewing power of the Spirit, is a remarkable asset to the Kingdom of God. Christianity makes sense and anyone who thoughtfully considers the plan of God will soon be able to communicate just how reasonable it really is to serve the Lord passionately. Faith is after all a certain knowledge of God, his heart, his plan and his character. Faith is a big, heartfelt “yes” to everything God has told us about himself through Jesus Christ! And our love for the Lord grows as our informed faith grows as a result of better understanding what God is saying to us about himself and his plan for our lives.

A mind that loves God will become a mind into which God will pour his wisdom and his insight. After all, our love relationship is with the almighty God who made the whole universe. Our God has all wisdom and all knowledge.

And as we commit all our ways to him in love, even our thinking, reasoning and learning, he gives us of his wisdom and his knowledge. All our intellectual ability ought to be dedicated to God. When it is, he will show us how to think and how to reason with less flaws and with more understanding.

There there is perfect order in God’s creation. We will find the same in his character as we learn to know him better through our love relationship with him. One of the main reasons that we love him so devotedly and passionately, is because his Gospel makes so much sense to poor sinners that are lost! It is what he showed us and taught us about himself that made us love him with all our hearts and soul. Therefore we simply have to love him also with all our mind.

FAILING THE SINNER'S PRAYER

Credit for this drawing belongs to The Naked Pastor.

Remember to take your vitamins

Are you deliberately recruiting another church's members?

Today I have a serious bone of contention to pick with pastors and congregation members of churches who willingly, and intentionally minister to people of another congregation with the covert purpose of getting them to join their church.

The past few weeks I observed several instances where this happened in our community. The script goes something like this. Somebody - mostly an active member of a specific church, as well as a devout follower of Jesus Christ - goes through a crisis. It could be ill health, death in the family or spiritual renewal caused by a fresh experience of God's love. In comes the friends who commiserate, support or shared the experience. They tell this person how God will help them, how they must pray and stand on God's word, how their new experience with God puts them in a new league of Christianity. In the case of illness I observed how the friends and pastors came to visit, prayed for a healing miracle, cast out demons and quite generally caused an emotional stir. Suddenly, the person who goes through the crisis isn't getting any spiritual meat from his/her old church. Their old pastor isn't as spirit-filled as the friends' pastors. Why isn't there any prophecies helping this person? The church doesn't teach the deeper things of the Bible. I even heard how the pastors of the "old" church were accused that they didn't look after their people as well as the "new" pastors did. All the while the suggestion is made that it could be time for these people to change churches.

You know what I also observed? It is mostly the more charismatic or pentecostal believers who do this. Their way of believing, their take on the Bible, their religious experiences and worship style are inadvertently always better than non-charismatic churches. They even go so far as to tell their friends in the non-charismatic churches that these churches aren't following God's Word as seriously as they do. It is even suggested that non-charismatic pastors need to convert, as many of them aren't really Christians. Most definitely they aren't as baptized with the Spirit as the charismatic pastors.

In the end, after all the spiritual posturing and claims of better access to God, these charismatic believers only want their friends to believe in exactly the same way as they do. These pastors only want to get more members (at the cost of other churches).

If you so desperately want to grow your congregation, why don't you go and evangelize the community's ample amount of non-churched people? Why do you have to declare Christians as mission field? Is this not extreme spiritual arrogance? At the least it is crossing an ethical boundary by destroying the unity of the body of Christ. I think it is theft and God will not honour a ministry built on the recruitment of another church's members through covert theological arrogance or intentional care during times of crisis.

I am deliberately being radical today. I am not angry. Neither am I anti-charismatic faith. I just want you to chat along with me on this issue as I saw how much pain and confuasion it caused in may lives the past couple of months.

Leave a comment. Differ from me. Share your own story.

Or am I only being oversensitive?

HEY BABY, IT'S WEEKEND

DO YOU WANT TO WRITE FOR THE EMERGING BRACKEN?

As of today I am inviting you to work with me on The Emerging Bracken as writer. If your passion is Christ, your interest is congregational ministry and your focus is on practical Christian living from a biblical perspective in today's world, you fit the bill. Even if your writing skills need to be honed, you could be eligible.

If successfull, you will be freelancing (unfortunately without renumeration) once a week with a specific topic which you will personally choose.

I'm putting together a team to expand The Emerging Bracken's ministry.

Send me an email to state your interest: guillaume[at]brackenfell-wes[dot]org[dot]za

Midweek Devotion

Written by Andries Combrink of Centurion West Presbyterian Church

The Ultimate Love Affair (3) - with all your soul!

We are not only to love God with all our heart, we are to love him with all your soul.

The soul speaks of our emotions. To love God with all our soul means that our love for God ought to be passionate. When we think of a love affair, we all think of passion. And we are all people of passion.

While we may try to deny our emotions, our emotions have a way of rising to the surface in spite of all our efforts to hide them. And emotions can be very good. God created our ability to feel and to feel passionately. Our emotions can make a most positive impact on our relationship with God and we must confirm that it is OK to express our emotions, especially as we express them in love for God. We simply ought to be emotional about our love for God. No, we are not talking about sentimentalism exposed in bad taste. We do not mean emotion only for emotion’s sake. We are talking about warm, passionate, self consuming love for the Lord who saved us.

Many people within our current society became cynical . They also became disillusioned and apathetic regarding “church”. Apathetic literally means "without passion." Others became passionate about less important matters and cooled off regarding the matter of salvation, of a lost world that needs to be reached with the Good News of Christ and about living holy lives for the Lord.

We cannot afford to be apathetic about our love for God. We must be excited about our relationship with Jesus. We must be passionate, because real, true love is passionate love. To love God with all our soul means that we must involve all our emotions in expressing our relationship with him.

When you gave Jesus your heart, sincerely and devotedly, it will be easy to become excited about following him.

Are you a Christian and Gay?

The past week the NHK (Netherdutch Reformed Church) held its General Church Meeting, or Synod. During this meeting its leaders decided to reaffirm the biblical concept of marriage as the only basis for relationships they can condone. They specifically rejected people living together without being formally married as within the confines of biblical interpretation and gay relationships as well.

In the same week blogger John Shore had an intense series of discussions of the issue of gay Christianity from an American perspective. The avalanche of comments showed that people still want to participate in the discussion.

I also meant to re-orient this blog as a more interactive platform. Therefore, I am inviting you to participate in the discussion. Please, feel free to leave a comment. I am hoping for fresh discussion from a South African perspective (with this being a South African blog and all), but anybody is welcome to speak.

Here is my opening statement (I do not necessarily agree or disagree with my own statement): As Christians we view relationships from a legalistic perspective and lose sight of God's relational heart. Therefore, we are intentionally excluding gay Christians from experiencing God's grace and love by rejecting their sexuality.

What do you think?